Famous Brothers and the Gift of Brotherhood
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A history of famous brothers, and the benefits/virtues of having a brother.
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There is something quietly intriguing about brothers as a historical category. Not fathers and sons, where the line of inheritance is obvious. Not husbands and wives, where alliance and intimacy are bound up with a kind of chosen household. Not friends, who may come together through temperament or shared work. Brothers are something else. They begin side by side, or nearly side by side, placed into the same early world by accident and biology, by family, by circumstance. They may resemble each other, or not at all. They may compete over the smallest things and then, years later, defend one another with a loyalty that feels older than thought. A brother can be the first rival, the first audience, the first witness. Someone who remembers, without needing explanation, the texture of a childhood room, the sound of a parent’s voice in the hallway, the odd rules of the household, the jokes that would make no sense if told outside the family. Brothers often share a past before they share an opinion. And perhaps that is why the history of brothers is so strange and so rich. It is a history of cooperation and resentment, invention and war, tenderness and estrangement. Brothers build cities, write stories, run kingdoms, betray one another, save one another, and occasionally, without quite meaning to, change the shape of the world. If one begins at the mythic beginning, one encounters brothers almost immediately, and not in an especially reassuring way. Cain and Abel are not merely siblings in the biblical imagination. They are the first brothers, and their story is already a story of jealousy, offering, comparison, and violence. It is a stark tale, almost too stark, as though ancient storytellers had noticed something unsettling at the root of brotherhood: that to grow beside another person is to be measured against them. One gives an offering, the other gives an offering. One is favored, or seems favored. The world, which might have appeared wide enough, narrows suddenly to a question: why him and not me? This is one version of brotherhood. It is not the whole of it, but it is ancient, and it keeps returning. In Rome’s origin story, too, there are brothers: Romulus and Remus. Twins, exposed as infants, suckled by a she-wolf, raised in the wild borderland between human civilization and animal survival. They are brothers in legend before they are citizens of any city. And when it comes time to found Rome, that great city of law and conquest and memory, there is once again a quarrel. Where should the city stand? Who has divine approval? Who has the right to rule? Remus mocks Romulus’s wall, or leaps over it, depending on the version, and Romulus kills him. A city begins, then, with fratricide. It is tempting to say that ancient cultures were simply pessimistic about brothers, but that may not be quite right. Perhaps they understood that brotherhood is powerful precisely because it is unstable. Brothers are close enough to love each other fiercely, and close enough to wound each other deeply. They are similar enough for comparison, different enough for rivalry. The brother is not a stranger, but not oneself either. He is a neighboring possibility. A version of life that might have been yours, had the same inheritance fallen slightly differently. And yet history gives us many brothers who were not defined by conflict, or not only by conflict. Some brothers become pairs, almost like double stars, each brightening the other by proximity. Consider the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville. Their story has been told so often that the airplane can obscure the people who made it. We remember the bicycle shop, Kitty Hawk, the first flight in 1903. We remember the machine lifting from sand into air. But before flight, there was an unusually durable collaboration between two brothers who seemed to possess, between them, a rare form of patience. Wilbur was older, intense, thoughtful, with a capacity for deep analysis. Orville was mechanically gifted, inventive, lively, perhaps more playful. They worked in close conversation, in a rhythm that seems almost impossible to reconstruct fully because so much of it depended on mutual familiarity. They argued, certainly. But their arguments were productive, almost like a shared instrument being tuned. They built upon each other’s doubts. They tested, recalculated, revised. There is a detail I find especially pleasing: before becoming aviation pioneers, they ran a bicycle business. The bicycle was itself a marvel of balance, efficiency, and light engineering. To repair and build bicycles is to develop a feel for motion, friction, chains, wheels, tension, weight. The bicycle shop was not a prelude in the merely biographical sense. It was a school. One can imagine the brothers surrounded by metal frames, tires, spokes, tools, and the ordinary traffic of customers, while somewhere in the background an impossible question was slowly becoming practical: how does one make a machine that does not merely roll, but flies? Their brotherhood mattered because their work required trust. The early flying machines were dangerous. The calculations were uncertain. The experiments failed repeatedly. A stranger might have drifted away. A colleague might have lost patience. But a brother, especially one who has already spent years in shared labor, can become a kind of second mind. Not always a harmonious mind, but a familiar one. Someone who will say, “That won’t work,” and remain in the room. Someone who can disagree without disappearing. This may be one of the quiet virtues of having a brother: the possibility of enduring disagreement. Not the dramatic disagreement of public debate, but the long, ordinary disagreement that keeps going across years. Brothers often learn, whether they like it or not, that affection does not require constant agreement. Indeed, sometimes agreement is less important than return. The quarrel ends, dinner happens, life resumes. Not always, of course. Some ruptures remain. But in many sibling relationships there is an early education in the fact that people can clash and still belong to one another. The Grimm brothers offer another kind of partnership. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are remembered for fairy tales, though their work was wider and more scholarly than the popular image suggests. They were linguists, philologists, collectors of folklore, students of language and culture. Their fairy tale collection, first published in the early nineteenth century, helped preserve and shape stories that had circulated orally in German-speaking lands. It is a curious thing, to gather tales. One must listen carefully, but also choose, edit, arrange. The Grimms were not recording devices. They were scholars and stylists. Their versions of stories such as “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Rapunzel,” and “Rumpelstiltskin” became, for many readers, the versions. Their brotherhood became attached to childhood itself, to the dark woods of imagination, to cottages, witches, clever youngest sons, impossible tasks, lost children, enchanted sleep. There is a tenderness in imagining the two brothers working through language together. They were not children preserving children’s tales; they were adults, scholars, living through a Europe full of upheaval, concerned with national identity, history, and the roots of speech. Yet the stories they collected often return to the fears and hopes of childhood: abandonment, hunger, disguise, cruelty, rescue, transformation. Brothers, perhaps, are well suited to stories about the persistence of the past. They carry childhood with them, sometimes unwillingly. A brother may be the only person left who remembers that one winter, that one kitchen, that one foolish family phrase. This can be irritating. It can also be a form of preservation. We are not entirely dependent on our own memory if someone else has kept part of it for us. The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, are less universally known than the Grimms, but their partnership has its own fascination. They were French writers in the nineteenth century, close collaborators, diarists, observers of literary and social life. Their journal remains one of the notable records of Parisian artistic culture of their time. They wrote novels together, moved through salons, noticed manners, rivalries, vanities, and the delicate cruelties of taste. Their brotherhood seems almost claustrophobic in its closeness. They shared a literary identity to an unusual degree, publishing under a joint name, composing together. When Jules died young, Edmond continued, but the partnership was broken. The famous Prix Goncourt, established through Edmond’s will, still bears their name, a literary prize founded from the afterlife of a brotherly collaboration. There is something poignant about brotherly fame when it is hyphenated or pluralized: the Brothers Grimm, the Wright brothers, the Goncourt brothers, the Marx Brothers. Individual identities remain, but the shared name becomes the public monument. It suggests that some achievements are not easily divisible. Who had the first idea? Who added the crucial correction? Who encouraged whom? Who did the invisible labor of belief? History often prefers clear authorship, but brothers complicate that. They remind us that creation often happens in the space between people. The Marx Brothers, of course, bring a very different energy. Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, and earlier Gummo, emerged from vaudeville into film, bringing with them a wild comic intelligence that still feels strangely modern. Their comedy is anarchic, verbal, musical, physical. Groucho’s eyebrows and cigar, Harpo’s silent mischief and harp, Chico’s accent and piano, the rapid overturning of every formal situation—these things belong to cinema history, but also to the strange chemistry of siblings performing together. Comedy among brothers has a special flavor. It often depends on timing that is older than rehearsal. Brothers know how to interrupt. They know how to provoke. They know the rhythm of annoyance, which is very close to the rhythm of comedy. In a family, one learns how to get a reaction. On stage, that instinct can become art. The Marx Brothers’ films often create a world in which authority is not defeated by a solemn revolution, but by relentless mockery. Contracts are shredded by wordplay. Operas are invaded. Wealthy fools are exposed. It is tempting to hear, underneath all this, the crowded household, the sibling contest for attention, the comic survival skills of children who learned early that wit could make space in a noisy world. Not all famous brothers worked together. Some were bound by contrast. Vincent van Gogh had a brother, Theo, without whom we might scarcely know Vincent at all. Theo was not famous in the same way. He was an art dealer, a supporter, a correspondent, and perhaps the most important witness to Vincent’s inner and artistic life. Their letters are among the most moving documents in art history. Vincent wrote to Theo about painting, poverty, illness, color, faith, despair, ambition, and the natural world. Theo sent money, encouragement, materials. He believed, with a steadiness that must have mattered beyond measure. In the story of Vincent and Theo, the virtue of brotherhood is not rivalry or collaboration in the ordinary sense, but accompaniment. Theo could not save Vincent from suffering. That is part of the sadness. Brotherhood is not magic. It does not abolish illness, failure, or loneliness. But Theo’s presence gave Vincent someone to address. And to have someone to address is no small thing. Many of Vincent’s thoughts about art survive because he could write them to his brother. The paintings and the letters now speak together. There are brothers who become a shelter for genius, not by being lesser, but by being faithful in another register. Theo’s role asks us to widen our idea of historical importance. Not everyone changes the world by producing the visible work. Some make the visible work possible. They send money. They answer letters. They listen through difficulty. They remember the person when the world sees only the failure or the myth. One might think also of William and Henry James. William, the psychologist and philosopher, expansive, searching, interested in consciousness, religion, habit, experience. Henry, the novelist, subtle, observant, master of social nuance and inward complication. They were not collaborators like the Wrights or the Grimms, but they formed a remarkable pair in the intellectual life of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The James family itself was extraordinary, full of thought, illness, travel, expectation, and pressure. William studied the mind directly, philosophically and psychologically. Henry studied minds indirectly, through fiction, through the delicate movement of perception in drawing rooms, marriages, conversations, silences. One brother asked what consciousness is; the other enacted consciousness sentence by sentence. Their careers seem to run parallel, each illuminating the other without merging. There is a kind of brotherly benefit here that has to do with scale. A brother can make one’s own life feel both singular and not singular. You are not alone in emerging from the same household, but you do not become the same person. You diverge. You test different answers to the same early conditions. One becomes a philosopher, another a novelist. One stays nearer to one country, another crosses the Atlantic imaginatively and literally. The brother is a reminder that origins matter, but they do not determine everything. History also gives us political brothers, and there the stakes often become sharper. John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy formed perhaps the most famous set of American political brothers in the twentieth century. Their story is so wrapped in glamour, tragedy, ambition, and public mythology that it is difficult to see it plainly. They were sons of a powerful family, shaped by expectation and competition. The presidency of John, the attorney generalship and later presidential campaign of Robert, the long Senate career of Edward—all of it gave the Kennedy name a dynastic quality unusual in American politics. What is notable, among other things, is how brotherhood can extend a public life beyond the life of one person. After John’s assassination, Robert carried part of the unfinished aura. After Robert’s assassination, Edward carried the burden of memory for decades. Whether one admires or criticizes the Kennedys, one can see how brothers may become vessels of continuity. The living brother is asked, fairly or unfairly, to answer for the dead, to continue the sentence. This is a heavy virtue, if virtue is the word: the capacity to carry family memory in public. Most brothers do this privately. One brother dies, and the other becomes the keeper of stories, gestures, resemblances. In political families, that intimate burden becomes historical spectacle. But the root is recognizable. To have a brother is to know that one’s own life may one day be remembered through another voice. There are also brothers whose relationship becomes a conflict over power, and here history has endless examples. The Ottoman Empire, for centuries, faced the problem of royal brothers with brutal clarity. A sultan’s brothers were potential claimants, and therefore threats. Fratricide, imprisonment, and confinement became features of dynastic survival. In many monarchies, brothers were not companions but dangers waiting in the bloodline. The same closeness that makes brotherhood intimate makes it politically perilous. A brother has a claim. A brother’s face resembles legitimacy. In England, the sons of William the Conqueror quarreled and fought over inheritance. In the ancient and medieval world, royal brothers repeatedly became rivals because kingdoms were not easily shared. Power dislikes siblings. It wants one line, one crown, one command. Brotherhood, by contrast, begins with plurality. It says: there is another one, near you, like you, with a story just as real. Perhaps this is why stories of brothers so often hover around inheritance. Land, blessing, throne, trade, name, approval. What is divided? What cannot be divided? What does one brother receive that the other does not? Jacob and Esau, in the Hebrew Bible, give us another foundational tale: twins struggling even before birth, one rough and outdoorsmanlike, one quieter, more domestic or cunning, depending on how one reads him. The birthright, the blessing, the deception, the long estrangement, and then the eventual meeting—these elements have echoed for centuries. The reunion of Jacob and Esau is one of the more mysterious brotherly scenes in ancient literature. Jacob fears revenge. Esau comes with men. Jacob sends gifts ahead, arranges his family, prepares for danger. But Esau runs to meet him and embraces him. They weep. It is not a simple reconciliation, and they do not exactly resume life together. They part. But something unclenches. This, too, belongs to brotherhood: the possibility that old rivalry may not have the final word. Not every wound is healed, not every relationship restored, but time can alter the meaning of what happened. A brother known in youth as a rival may appear later as another aging person carrying the same vanished world. The old contest may seem, if not trivial, then smaller than it once did. One of the benefits of having a brother, then, may be the long arc of comparison changing into recognition. In childhood, comparison can be sharp. Who is taller, faster, cleverer, favored, freer? In adulthood, if fortune allows, the brother may become less a competitor than a fellow survivor of the same beginning. The question shifts from “Which of us is ahead?” to “Do you remember?” And memory is a different kind of wealth. There are brothers in science, too, whose shared name is less famous but still worth noticing. The Huxley family, for example, produced Julian and Aldous Huxley—brothers, though not collaborators in a narrow sense. Julian became a biologist, one of the figures associated with evolutionary thought in the twentieth century. Aldous became the novelist and essayist, author of “Brave New World,” interested in perception, society, mysticism, and the dangers of technological order. Like William and Henry James, they seem to represent two different intellectual responses to modernity: one scientific, one literary, both concerned with what human beings are becoming. Again we see divergence from a shared root. Brothers need not do the same work to influence each other. Sometimes the influence is atmospheric. A household where ideas are taken seriously may produce different kinds of seriousness. One brother studies evolution; another imagines a future in which human beings are engineered, conditioned, pacified. Between them, one can sense a conversation about biology, freedom, society, and consciousness, even if that conversation is not always explicit. And then there are brothers in music: the Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, whose close harmonies shaped early rock and country-inflected pop; the Bee Gees, Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, whose voices braided together across decades; the Jackson brothers, whose family band became a global phenomenon before Michael’s singular fame altered the balance forever. Sibling harmony is not merely a metaphor. Voices from the same family can share timbres, vowel shapes, instinctive phrasing. When brothers sing together, their biological relatedness can become audible. The listener hears difference and sameness at once. There is a small wonder in harmony itself. One voice carries a melody; another moves beside it, not identical, not opposed. The beauty lies in relation. Too close, and the voices blur. Too far, and they separate. Harmony requires distinctness held in proportion. It is not a bad image for brotherhood at its best. The benefits of having a brother are not always sentimental. A brother may teach one to negotiate territory: the shared bedroom, the borrowed shirt, the last piece of bread, the volume of music, the boundary between teasing and cruelty. He may teach endurance, not through noble lessons, but through the daily inconvenience of another will. He may puncture vanity with alarming efficiency. A brother often has access to the version of you that existed before accomplishment, before refinement, before the public self. This can be humbling. It can also be relieving. To be known before one became impressive is a peculiar gift. The world often meets us after we have assembled ourselves. A brother may remember the unassembled form. He may know the embarrassing enthusiasms, the failed experiments in identity, the childish fears. This knowledge can be used unkindly, of course. But when held with affection, it gives a person continuity. You are not only your résumé, your reputation, your current opinions. You are also the child who built forts, who lied badly, who cried over something now forgotten, who once believed a certain tree was the edge of the world. Famous brothers make this visible on a grander scale, but the underlying pattern is ordinary. The Wright brothers in their bicycle shop. The Grimms with their manuscripts. Vincent writing to Theo. The Marx Brothers refining chaos into timing. The Kennedys carrying public inheritance. Jacob and Esau meeting after years of fear. Again and again, brotherhood appears as a relationship of proximity across difference. It would be false to speak only of virtues. Some brothers harm one another. Some rivalries never soften. Some families distribute love so unevenly that siblings become witnesses to injury rather than companions through it. The mere fact of having a brother guarantees nothing. Brotherhood is material, not finished form. It can become loyalty, competition, indifference, partnership, burden, comedy, grief. Its virtue lies partly in what is made from it over time. Maybe this is why famous brothers hold our attention. They dramatize something many people know in quieter ways: that identity is not formed alone. Even solitude has witnesses. Even genius has correspondents, rivals, editors, companions, people who shared the early weather. A brother may stand in the background of a life, not always central, not always easy, but somehow part of the architecture. If one imagines history as a long road, brothers keep appearing along its edges. Two boys in a workshop adjusting wings. Two scholars bending over old tales. Two performers listening for the exact instant to interrupt. One painter in distress writing to the brother who will understand enough. Two heirs circling a throne. Two old men meeting after years of grievance. Sometimes they walk together. Sometimes one goes ahead. Sometimes they part and remain linked only by memory. The virtue of a brother, when the relationship is fortunate, may be that he is both companion and contrast. He proves that a shared beginning can lead elsewhere. He may steady a person not by offering advice, but by existing as a familiar point of reference. He can remind, challenge, irritate, protect, and remember. He may be the person with whom one first learns that love is not always gentle, that rivalry is not always hatred, and that the past is not entirely gone while someone else still carries it. And perhaps, in the end, that is the quietest gift. A brother is someone who can say, in one form or another: I was there too. Not for everything. Not for the private chambers of the heart. But for the beginning, or some important stretch of it. I saw the house, the road, the parents when they were younger, the old dog, the strange wallpaper, the summer when everything changed. I remember. History tends to preserve the large achievements: the airplane, the fairy tales, the films, the paintings, the speeches, the crowns. But beneath those achievements one often finds smaller rooms, shared jokes, arguments, letters, meals, obligations, and the stubborn fact of having come from the same place. Brothers remind us that human lives are braided. Sometimes loosely, sometimes painfully, sometimes with extraordinary grace. And in that braiding there is a kind of historical force, not always visible from a distance, but present all the same: the force of one life leaning against another, resisting it, echoing it, answering it, carrying it forward.